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Captain Prescott Currier, a cryptographer, looked at the Voynich many moons ago, and made some very perceptive comments about it, which can be seen here on Rene Zandbergen’s site.

In particular, he noticed that the handwriting was different between some folios and others, and he also noticed (based on glyph/character counts) that there were two “languages” being used.

When I first looked at the manuscript, I was principally considering the initial (roughly) fifty folios, constituting the herbal section. The first twenty-five folios in the herbal section are obviously in one hand and one ‘‘language,’’ which I called ‘‘A.’’ (It could have been called anything at all; it was just the first one I came to.) The second twenty-five or so folios are in two hands, very obviously the work of at least two different men. In addition to this fact, the text of this second portion of the herbal section (that is, the next twenty-five of thirty folios) is in two ‘‘languages,’’ and each ‘‘language’’ is in its own hand. This means that, there being two authors of the second part of the herbal section, each one wrote in his own ‘‘language.’’ Now, I’m stretching a point a bit, I’m aware; my use of the word language is convenient, but it does not have the same connotations as it would have in normal use. Still, it is a convenient word, and I see no reason not to continue using it.

We can look at some statistics to see what he was referring to. Let’s compare the most common words in Folios 1 to 25 (in the Herbal section, Language A, written in Hand 1) and in Folios 107 to 116 (in the Recipes section, Language B, written in a different Hand):

Comparison between word frequencies in Languages A and B

So, for example, in Language A the most common word is “8am” and it occurs 192 times in the folios, whereas in Language B the most common word is “am”, occuring 137 times.

We might expect that these are the same word, enciphered differently. The question then is, how does one convert between words in Language A and words in Language B, and vice versa? In the case of the “8am” to “am” it’s just a question of dropping the “8”, as if “8” is a null character in Language A. In the case of the next most popular words, “1oe”(A) and “1c89″(B) it looks like “oe”(A) converts to “c89″(B). And so on.

If we look at the most popular nGrams (substrings) in both Languages, perhaps there is a mapping that translates between the two. Perhaps the cipher machinery that was used to generate the text had different settings, that produced Language A in one configuration, and Language B in another. Perhaps, if we look at the nGram correspondence that results in the best match between the two Languages, a clue will be revealed as to how that machinery worked.

This involves some software (I’m using Python now, which is fun). The software first calculates the word frequencies for Language A and B in a set of folios (the table above is an output from this stage). It then calculates the nGram frequencies for each Language. Here are the top 10:

The software then runs a Genetic Algorithm to find the best mapping between the two sets of nGrams, so that when the mapping is applied to all words in Language B, it produces a set of words in Language A the frequencies of which most closely match the frequencies of words observed in Language A (i.e. the frequencies shown in the first table above).

Here is an initial result. With the following mapping, you can take most common words in Language B, and convert them to Language A.

Table for converting between a Language B word and a Language A word

A couple of remarks. This is an early result and probably not the best match. There are some interesting correspondences :

“9” and “c” are immutable, and have the same function

Another interesting feature is that “4o” in Language B maps to “o” in Language A, and vice versa!

in Language B, “ha” maps to “h” in Language A, as if “a” is a null

In the Comments, Dave suggested looking at word pair frequencies between the Languages. Here is a table of the most common pairs in each Language.

Common word pairs in Languages A and B

For clarity, I am using what I call the “HerbalRecipesAB” folios for this study i.e.

The significance of the Gallows characters

There are 19 gallows characters in Glen Caston’s Voyn_101 transcription:

Unlike the majority of standard VMs characters/glyphs, these are unusual in appearance and some appear to be composites of other gallows with the “c” and/or “cc” characters. My opinion is that the 2nd and 4th in the above set are the same, as are the 1st and 8th. This reduces the count to 17. An attractive proposition is that these are simply the capital letters in an alphabet of 17 letters. Indeed, the gallows characters often appear initially in the first word on a page. However, they also appear within VMs words, which is odd – unless a) the VMs words are not words at all, orb) they have been assembled unusually (e.g by anagramming).

A Caution

"Students who have approached the Voynich text from the point of view of the professional cryptanalyst have been led on at first by a deceptive surface appearance of simplicity, only to bog down sooner or later in an exasperating quagmire of paradoxes and enigmas that reveal themselves one by one as the analysis proceeds."
- Mary d'Imperio